by Oto | Jul 16, 2026 | Creativity, Design, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Personal Development, Productivity
AI didn't make me lazy. It handed me my own subconscious.
Right now I’m eating turkey pepper soup at my work desk, and I have multiple jobs running with AI.
One agent is taking a client project from brief to restructured profile to redesign, start to finish. First time I’ve ever let it run the whole thing. I don’t know if it will work. Another is deploying new functionality to one of my platforms. And in Obsidian, I’m voice-dumping to a third one, playing with an idea I want to post tonight. The post you’re reading now.
For the past year I’ve been all the way into AI. Like, REALLY into it. Last year, I was very skeptical. This year I had my road to Damascus moment, and I wrote about what I saw back in April, after building eight apps in six weeks without knowing how to code.
I said work was no longer about doing the work but directing it. That you need a meta approach: understand the work, its value, the systems and workflows around it, not just the task in front of you. I said AI was a motorbike for the mind, but it still needs a mind to steer it.
It’s hard to explain sometimes, but something in my mind shifted. I felt the shape of something, innately, and I’ve been chasing it ever since. The months since have been me living inside that idea. Pushing it to new and strange places.
Hold on. My agent just sent back design references. I’m laughing. Goddamn, that actually looks pretty good. Okay. Wow.
Where was I...
Oh yes, I’m always thinking about the work, not just the task.
What does it actually take to do the thing? What are the systems around it, what is the workflow, how does the work get done? Because once you can see that clearly, then you can abstract it. And once you can abstract it, you can encode it. And that is a profound thing.
If you can encode the work then you can manipulate it, engage with it in different modes. You can switch things around. You can add force multipliers at different points. You don’t just know what you are doing, you have a sense of how, and it can live outside your head and talk back to you.
I’ve spent months encoding ideas into software. I built a brand operating platform that walks you from audit all the way to growth. It’s built on my methodology, prompts, sequence, step by step. I found the methodology as I built the different parts, intuitively, in the dark it seemed half the time, with moments of radiant brilliant recognition.
That’s an idea encoded into a framework. It works.
Earlier this week I wrote a book about that methodology in five minutes. Assembled it, really. Five minutes of assembly, sitting on a vault full of notes, a pile of blog posts, months of conversations with my agents, and ten years of doing the work. First the idea lived in chat. Then it became software. Then content. Then the book. And halfway through restructuring the book I realised part of my software was wrong, and now I have to go fix it. That is what it looks like to attack an idea from every side.
Each medium teaching you something new about the whole thing.
Moving at this speed poses some questions. After months of it, “can I do it” is not the question anymore. It’s more like...okay, where are my leverage points? How do I stay sharp, hone my true unfair advantage, and not succumb to outsourcing the real thing to the machine?
My intuition points me to the loops. With these tools, the loops are faster. Iteration, feedback, build, review. That is the defining feature. When you can move from idea to software to content to book to corrected software in a week, what would take months, decades even, to surface and refine can come out much faster. The sheer speed of the loop makes you better faster...I think...It is a lot. The brain is still adjusting.
Now on to design...taste. That has always been the tricky part. That’s the piece I wrote off in April as the untemplatable part. And even as I push further into AI (I’ve moved from working in Claude chat, to cowork, to code, to terminal, and now my own agentic dashboard, in months), lately I’ve been circling back to doing more design, more writing, more directing. I have a clearer sense of what can be reliably delegated and what can’t. For now.
I’ve been seeing a lot of things as code lately. By that I mean breaking everything into its component parts and seeing how they relate, how they combine. I have been thinking about brand design the same way.
Here’s the workflow I’ve been running for a few weeks. Point the AI at a reference, or an old document, and have it extract everything, the ideas, the layouts, the type, the colour, the textures, the imagery, into a structured brand guide template that I can parse and it can understand.
Then we work. Sometimes twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours straight on one guide. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. I still work very hard. More now, I think. But every time I work hard now, the payoff is more than the thing. The payoff is the lesson. The payoff is me understanding my own process and learning how to communicate it to the machine. The work deposits something now, where it used to just get lost to the subconscious.
People say AI makes you lazy. I don’t know, not really my experience man. I think it is the most incredible extraction tool for everything you’ve been doing for years, for better or worse. All that subconscious knowledge, the stuff you were just good at without knowing why, for the first time you can extract it, name it, use it, tweak it. Being good at it becomes knowing why you’re good at it, becomes being able to hand it over. Conscious competency, then conscious delegation.
And once you have it named, and in your hand, it is a very powerful tool.
When you know the pieces, you know what to tweak. I understand the visual side of branding differently now. A component is no longer there because I like it. It is there because it makes sense for what the brand is supposed to be. Every tweak points at the concept. Naming my own process made me better at the process. The extraction improves the thing it extracts from.
Which brings me to tonight’s test. I’m tired. It’s been a heavy week, two days straight deep in platform UI, and a client needs this thing. And I’ve been wrestling my way to a simple admission: it is time to let go more. To embrace the leverage I’ve been building.
Sometimes you hold the AI’s hand all the way, step by step. But after you’ve done that long enough, like training a junior, there comes a day when you say: just do this. And what comes back is decent.
Tonight is that day. That’s the agent running the client project while I chop pepper soup.
And maybe there’s one more step. Maybe the agent that knows me, that has my context, my workflow, my biases, all the things in my head I usually have to connect myself, maybe at the end of the day I can jam with it the way I always tear the workday down, and out of that comes a blog post. In my voice. Edited by me. Fueled by my flow, by what happened today.
Tonight is the first time I’m fully embracing that as a valid part of my process. Dump to draft to posted, tonight. Because honestly, I’ve been having ideas and documenting concepts and lessons faster than I can deploy them, and I’ve been deploying fast.
So this is another experiment: what happens when I post the ideas as I have them, instead of sitting on them until they’re perfect. I want to join the conversation. I want to hear what you’re learning and trying, because some of what I’ve found is genuinely interesting, and I suspect some of what you’ve found is too.
That’s what this is. The same creative flow. With the brush, with the mouse, with the pen.
I am pouring my heart and mind out, the way I always did with a piece of paper in front of me. The way I always did with the blank Notion page.
The surface just thinks now.
The tools got smarter.
The hand is still mine.
by Oto | Apr 11, 2026 | Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Productivity
And I don't even know how to code
There is a revolution happening right now.
At the very front lines, things are pretty insane, new tools, frameworks and lines of attack open every day. Entire workflows and production lines are flipped on their head weekly. The very fabric and nature of knowledge work is being rewritten at the speed of algorithm.
But at the back of the class, things are still chilled. In some spaces, there are hushed whispers of a coming rumbling, but really, most people are mostly oblivious or living like everything is business as usual.
I have used AI for about a year now. I will admit I was hesitant, the earlier use cases were not very inspiring, the ethics were dodgy. Was this a real tool, or just some other hype train thing that Big Tech was bent on making a thing? They have been flailing for a real win, a real life changing, paradigm leap forward. From the crypto to the metaverse to NFTs, now AI…was this it?
At first, I mostly used it as a glorified ‘ipsum lorem’ generator for website builds.
But it was over conversations with a friend over Christmas, last year that started the second wave of my journey. He casually mentioned that he used AI for everything, he even showed me some rudimentary apps he had made.
I shrugged it off, but eventually, I got curious. What if I actively used AI to solve problems, or build things?
I needed a proper notion dashboard for my business - something I could use to track my numbers, keep track of deals, open projects, client meetings, content, all of it.
So, I tried first, got stuck and then told ChatGPT what I was trying to do, sent some screenshots and in a few minutes, we had mapped out what I needed to do, and I spent the afternoon building it out. Soon enough, I had my dashboard.
Hmm…interesting.
I fed it another idea I had - automating my brand workshops.
I had an idea of how I wanted to make it work, it gave me a workflow, I took it and went off to build. I spent a day struggling and fussing, but couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted, and the AI kept not giving me the solution I needed, so I left it.
I used it to work through some brand clarity issues, create a content plan and solve some small problems. It was helpful, but too focused on its own paths. Every time I used it to write, it sounded more like itself than me. And sure it showed me how to build things, but it itself couldn’t do much.
Then I met Claude. I fed it my idea for the automated workshop. It asked me a few questions.
And then it just built it.
It didn’t give me a long list of things to do. I didn’t need to learn new technologies, or go do further research. It just made the thing I asked for.
That was the first mind-blowing thing. Over hours of prompting back and forth, I had a working prototype of my idea. It was a real thing, that worked just the way I imagined it should. Over the next week, I kept prompting, adding features, adjusting the layout.
Eventually, I took the UI, put it in Figma and explored design options until I found one I liked, threw it back to Claude and it coded my project pixel perfect.
Incredible.
The next week was mostly ideation, bouncing concepts back and forth, putting my brand through my workshop, pushing the answers into Claude, refining, creating reference sheets and brand guides, giving Claude even more context. A process of iterative refinement.
Every time I would log on to X, I’d see even more use cases and projects, and workflows. People were actively experimenting and documenting, pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible.
A new way of working was literally being born. For the first time, a lot of ideas were possible, at the very least, we could take them from static designs and interactive prototypes to actually real, deployable products.
The tasks that always took too long, the steps that were tedious, the bottlenecks…here were emerging the tools, frameworks and workflows to fix all that.
I realised that my tech stack was obsolete. Sure, it is still working now - the Office Suite, the Adobe Suite, all the management, note taking, communication tools.
But in truth, everything was free game, everything was subject to change. The hot new design workflows on the block are not in Adobe, they are in Figma, and Framer, and Claude and Stitch and Nano Banana. There will be even more new names tomorrow.
These tools take skills that were hard to access and democratise them.
For the beginners and the unskilled, it gives them a chance to enter the game, to play around with ideas, for now.
For those who are already skilled, with years in the game and hard-won experience and judgement, it makes us 10x.
If you are actually already good at what you do, AI gives you the ability to be even better.
The opportunities for leverage are insane.
Yes this is a glaze fest.
And I haven’t even gotten around to the most sublime experience I had.
Prompting through a Saturday night in March, working on my ever expanding list of ideas, I decided to feed Claude my personal website. Look at all 200+ of my blog posts and analyse and give feedback.
The rest of that day was almost a spiritual experience. It went through all my writing and in less than 3 minutes had given me a full breakdown. It pointed out my best writing and my weakest, it led me down a path that felt truly cathartic, helping me process something about my writing that had never quite been articulated before.
Sure, I might be microdosing on AI psychosis.
I mean I am aware about how ‘weird’ it is to feel strongly about something that isn’t…alive.
But it fulfilled a real need, it gave real value, it made me more confident in my peculiar style of writing, in what makes me me.
In all of this, I have come to understand something that I have hinted about throughout this piece, and something I touched on at the beginning.
The world is changing. In more profound ways than people realise. I might be being hyperbolic, but it is what I truly believe. AI is beyond AI slop. There is definitely low quality AI output and tools and products, sure. There is also slop of everything.
But for the creators, the generalists, the combinators, the one-man armies, there is a whole paradigm shift of work that is happening, a whole generation of tools and workflows that are emerging, that fundamentally change what is possible.
And if you are not actively experimenting and seeing what works best for you, and trying out not just new tools, but new ways of thinking about and approaching work, then you will be fundamentally unprepared for the world that is to come.
That is what I see happening.
There are some key ideas I will leave you with, ways I am thinking about AI and how I am making my own way forward…
If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, AI is a motorbike.
The computer allowed us to do so much more, store more information, manipulate it more, create more. AI will allow us to do even more, faster. AI is a tool, a very powerful one, but It still needs a mind to steer it.
Work used to be about doing the work. Now it is more about directing the work.
You have to have a meta approach to work. You need to not just do the work, you need to understand the work you are doing, what its value is, where it plugs into, and the workflows you use to get them done.
You have to think in systems and workflows
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about work or life than most people do. Most people just do things, they don’t often apply a meta abstraction to what they do. But this is a core skill everyone needs to have now. When you understand your workflows and systems, you are first of all able to design them better, before even applying technology.
With this understanding, you can streamline it even further with AI, or replace some parts of the workflow or hand it off to AI completely. The point is you can supercharge the way you do things.
Experiment. Do old tasks with new tools
These days, I try things a lot. I try to build a whole website with Claude instead of WordPress and Divi. Instead of defaulting to Illustrator for design, I try Figma instead. Instead of building a whole presentation from scratch with Powerpoint, I try out Canva.
I am often slower, I often have to revert back to old tools for certain things. But I am shaking things up, understanding the tools that are available and thinking about my work and workflow in new ways.
Just this morning (of writing this), a client woke me up, he needed an excel quote designed into a branded pdf one.
Now, usually, I would have opened up Excel, edited the tables in there, or created a word document, and imported all the information in, and redesigned the whole document to fit the brand.
Instead, I fired up Claude, asked it to convert the document to PDF based on the brand look and feel. A few prompts later, and a quick sample design in illustrator to show it exactly the visual layout I wanted, we had it done. A successful client project, using new tools and workflows.
This morning I have been experimenting with Wispr, trying out its dictation capabilities.
Document, Iterate
An interesting effect to notice has been this iterative, self referential aspect to the process.
I work with AI (mostly Claude) to better understand myself, my processes, my positioning. I document it with AI, and then feed it back to AI. We improve, we refine. We inject in ideas from other places, fields, experts. I define myself again, document it and feed it back to AI. On and on. We keep shifting and evolving and becoming even clearer.
The documentation helps the AI to remember, and it shows me a documentation of how far I have come. With this focused iterative process, I do feel I am growing much faster than I used to. I mean just my studio homepage has changed at least 7 times since the year started.
Build your own tools
In the past 6 weeks, I have built about 8 apps. 4 of them based around my thesis on brand and brand building, the rest as internal tools to help me understand and run my business better. Each of them uniquely tailored to my situation and needs. Each of them opening up new ways of working and creating. This new wave of technology allows us to create things that commercial software couldn’t. Tools that are truly customised to us.
These are exciting times we live in. A whole new emerging world of knowledge work powered by AI. Things have been changing quickly, there is a lot of uncertainty and dangers to navigate. But there is also a lot of opportunities if you are willing to seek them out and embrace change.
Let’s keep building.
by Oto | Mar 5, 2025 | Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Personal Development
I have always wanted to lead a creative life. The idea of spending most of my time immersed in the art, act and process of making sounds like the most appealing life to me.
Not fame or incredible wealth, but creativity.
I always thought that if I was able to sort out everything I needed to, and had enough to live off without thinking of money, I would spend all my time exploring and making stuff. That’s what I’ve always thought.
But actually making the time to do that, is a challenge.
One thing that stuck with me in my earlier years studying architecture, was the sense of a dedication to the aesthetic. And when I say that, I don’t just mean the surface look of things, I mean the philosophy and essence of thinking and making, of moulding artefacts and spaces. In this time, I was exposed to so many interesting things, and concepts. Many of which went over my head at the time, but few definitely struck a chord.
In my autodidactic journey since, I have carried that sense with me.
One thing I loved about the experience was the time in studio. We had this big open plan space where we all worked and made our models and worked on our designs. There was a compelling energy about the whole thing. And as I have delved into the lives and inspirations of artists and creators over time, I have enjoyed catching glimpses into their studios, spaces and processes.
I have always wanted a studio of my own.
It is why I call my company a studio, and not an agency.
For me the studio is a place of learning, experimenting and creating, and I think that is a beautiful thing. Creativity that is not just at the service of commerce, but a tool, a practice for being, for discovery, for evolving, for making oneself.
In trying to bring that to life, I have always had to balance this deep desire against economic realities. Most of my time and energy was held up in hustling and making money. And sure, the thing I do, my career is a creative one, so yes, I create all the time and I have grown and learned from that.
But it is my belief that creativity should exist unshackled by commerce, powered by pure soul. Which is why I have always written here, since 2010. Whether there was one person reading or a hundred.
And even when people advised me to monetise this in different ways, I always pushed back, feeling it would dilute the spirit of it. Imagine throwing ads all over this site to get ad money. Or tailoring my content to meet some algorithm instead of writing from my soul. What sin!
So today…some 14 years later, I feel ready to embrace cultivating a creative lifestyle on a deeper level. Sure, I do still need to work and spin my gears in the machine of commerce. But I am able to balance things a bit better. I want to focus on carving and cultivating a creative life.
I am a good creative. I am also a lazy one. I take a lot of shortcuts. And in the fast paced world of design and business, speed is prioritised over craft many times. I hardly have the space and time to really craft something special. In embracing a creative life and devoting time to it, I am hoping to study, to get better, to improve, to pick up new skills, to be able to do more. To learn myself, to create myself, to connect with others like me. To create cool things for you.
That is one of my personal themes for the year.
So, how does that work?
For me, it means creating all the time, in any medium.
They say you should niche down, find one thing and get really good at it.
I’m not doing that.
Personally, I want to try everything. I want to draw, and paint, write, take photos, shoot videos, design a space, design a building. I want to cook, d-jay, edit, design posters. I want to make books, and pulpy magazines. I want to work on a movie, help design a set, create in 3D and play with animation. I just want to make cool things.
When I think about cultivating a creative life, a few ideas come to mind.
Reclaim lost time
The first major challenge in living a more creative life is allocating the time to it. Making time from all the other things that demand my attention, and choosing to invest it instead in making, studying, and experimenting. What lost time can I reclaim for this purpose? What can I let go off to free up the space to create more?
Instead of scrolling, I could paint. Instead of obsessing over some client project, I could write. I could make quick sketches during my breaks. The point is learning to tuck away pockets of creativity into the mundane.
Always seek inspiration
To approach day to day life in a deeper way, to pay more attention. To not merely see things, but to really look at them, to study them, to sketch them, to research about them. To look at the mundane around you and discover the magic.
Make it easy to create all the time
I want to always be creating, with whatever time or resources I may have on hand. In compressed times, to make sketches, take notes, make snippets, make prototypes. And when able to dedicate more time, to go deeper and develop those into full works. To have the tools and set spaces available to begin creating at any time.
Watch and absorb the greats
It is important to look at what others have done. To be inspired and see ways, techniques and ideas that we can adopt into our own processes and style.
Embrace process
To be systematic in the ways that call for it, so I can be messy in execution. Being able to spread out the creative process, and do different bits at different times. To have systems, tools and processes, to capture ideas and bring them up when needed.
Embrace the discipline of practice
It does take some effort, to sit down and create, or study, or experiment, especially when you are not used to doing so regularly. But that is the point of cultivating a creative life, is to get more disciplined, to invest more time in slowing down, and engaging deeply, with art, with life.
This is my present intention, to lead a more creative life, to cultivate more of that energy, and these ideas may or may not survive contact with reality, but being creative is about sailing into the unknown and evolving into new modes of being and birthing new things.
Are you trying to cultivate more creativity in your life? What obstacles are you facing and what ideas can you share?
by Oto | Jul 18, 2024 | Creativity, Design, Inspiration, Musings, Personal Development
The concept of curation* has been on my mind for at least the past 2 years. Slowly coalescing over time as I have been fixated on the idea of defining and creating specific spaces and experiences around me.
This is a natural extension of the theme of ‘Life by Design’ - creating a life that is tailored to you, that affirms who you are, who you want to be, and what you seek to accomplish.
I have discussed the importance of your environment and why you must design your spaces in ways that support the pursuit of your goals and passions. But beyond just your environment, all things can be brought to align with your intention. The things you do, the clothes you wear, the people you interact with, the places you go. All of this can be curated around your identity.
Like I said, over the past few years, I have been engaging with this practice of curation. I have specifically selected and chosen the things around me. My space is a curation of objects and tools that are chosen and actively sought after to create the vibe I desire to live in. The people I spend time with are curated towards a similar purpose.
We all do this anyway. We all curate our lives in some way. The things we choose to watch, engage with, and use, are things that we are drawn to or exposed to. The question is, do we just allow these things into our lives haphazardly or do we consciously choose them? Because oftentimes, some of the things around us are not things we actively chose. Many times they were just always there, or they were handed to us by factors outside our control.
But being awake to life, to ourselves and our purpose, we have the ability to curate, to create around us the spaces, the people, the things, the practices, the rituals, the habits that serve that purpose, that help us grow, evolve, and be effective.
This is the philosophy of curation - bringing the practice of consciousness, of awareness, and deliberate choice to every part of our lives. To embrace the things we deem important, that give us life, fulfillment, pleasure, joy and curate around them, to invest in them, to share them. It is the path of intentionality - choosing and organising the tools, people, things and spaces that reinforce our values, desires and ambitions.
That is why we curate, as a discipline to life.
And what we choose to omit from our lives is just as important as what we choose to keep.
So what are some key things to keep in mind when curating our lives?
Know yourself, Observe yourself
Self-awareness is the starting point for all of this. It is impossible to curate if you don’t even know who you are. A sense of identity and purpose is absolutely vital. Know yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, interests, and know where you are trying to go, and what you are trying to do.
Take stock of what you have, of how things are right now. What can be improved? What needs to be adjusted, what habits do you need to drop, what rituals do you need to adopt? Look at areas where you can grow and take the necessary steps to implement them.
Curate all areas, Curate for Life
Have a holistic approach to curation and apply the principles across all areas of your life - your diet, your space, your habits, workflows, workspace, clothing, and leisure. Curate and improve every aspect of your life.
Don’t curate and optimise just for productivity and high performance, also curate for fun and pleasure, for relief, for rest and restoration. Curate your life in such a way that each part is balanced appropriately.
Seek Inspiration, Keep Evolving
It is okay to look at what others are doing. Look for inspiration and best practices, ideas that show you how great things can be in those areas of your life. They will help boost your interest and excitement and transform your life.
This is not a stagnant thing, to be done, set, and forgotten. It is a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life. To stay in tune with a sense of self, and to perpetually change and evolve the things around us in ways that stay true to who we are. As we evolve and grow over time, so we curate our lives to reflect that.
Embrace some level of chaos
We live in a world, we exist in community. Everyone has their own ideas of what is important and how lives should be. We have to exist in conversation with that. With the ideas and practice of curation, it is easy to design ourselves into isolated bubbles. But it is important to interact with things outside our curations, to have impact, to learn things we never would have, and to share our unique perspectives.
The power of curation is the ability to create the person you want to be. With it, you can significantly transform your life. It will help you hone your environment and routines in ways that will catalyse your growth and fulfilment. Add it to your toolbox, as you create a life by design.
…
Side Note
*In our present-day culture, we understand the concept of curation from the art world, the process of selecting and organising artworks into a cohesive show or exhibition. The etymology of the word is from the Latin word curare, meaning to take care. This idea of caring for something persisted from the Roman times when it meant to take care of the bathhouses. In medieval times, it denoted the priest who cared for souls, by the 18th century it had come to mean looking after artifacts and art collections.
[In a 2014 interview in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/23/hans-ulrich-obrist-art-curator#:~:text=It's worth thinking about the,care of the bath houses.)*, Hans Ulrich Obrist posits that as a profession, curation meant at least four things. To preserve and safeguard the heritage of art, to be a selector of new work, to connect to art history, and to display or arrange the work.*
If I were to extrapolate those 4 key pillars to the idea of curating for life, I would say it means - to preserve what already works, to seek new ideas and practices, to connect to a deep sense of self/identity, and to be organised and deliberate in how we live.
by Oto | Dec 13, 2022 | Creativity, Inspiration, Personal Development, Productivity
The other day I was on TikTok (I know, bear with me as I gag for a bit 🤮). But I came across this clip that I found useful and got me thinking more about this concept of leading and lagging indicators.
This idea has its origins in business and economics circles. Leading and lagging indicators are the inputs and results that influence or showcase the position or trajectory of a business or entity.
Let’s break it down.
Lagging indicators are essentially results. They are the output, the culmination of all the your actions up to this point. They show you where you stand now and where you are coming from. These are things like your weight, your bank balance, your general level of happiness, whatever metric you want to look at.
This is usually where most people new to goal setting start when they begin their approach. They set goals based on lagging indicators, looking solely at the end result of their efforts, and then its off to the races.
You go out and you do whatever you have chosen as your path to get there. You keep in mind the goal of gaining 5kg, and you push on going to the gym 3 times a day, eating healthy, all the while comparing your results against your goals. Each week, you weigh yourself and see how well you are doing towards your goal.
This is useful, you have a clear sense of where you are, and where you want to go. By monitoring your results, the lagging indicators, you can keep yourself accountable to your goal.
However, this approach is limited for 3 reasons.
- Your focus is solely on your results which is just a snapshot of what has already happened. This would be the lump sum of your good efforts, a bunch of wasted effort and probably a lot of inertia and missteps. It’s good information, but you can’t change the past, and it has come too late.
- Because results can take time to manifest and arrive, we run the risk of getting discouraged on working towards our goals, and doing less of the things we need to be doing. You are a failure from day one, until you finally hit the goal.
- When you are only focused on results, you can easily fool yourself that you are busy taking action, when you are really just doing busy work and avoiding the real tasks you must undertake. Your inputs may not be targeted enough.
A better path to goal achieving, is to focus on leading indicators, the inputs needed to get you where you need to go. You need to be clear on choosing high quality inputs - what actual actions you need to take to achieve your goal. These are things like how often you work out, how consistent you are, what you eat every day.
So, your ‘focus’ shifts from the goal - ‘I want to gain 5kg’ to the process - ‘I work out 3 times a week and eat 5 nutritious meals every day’. And that becomes the target to hit every week and iterate upon, because instead of being solely obsessed about what results you are getting, you are focusing on the things that are actually in your control to execute and do.
If you are able to focus on these and get them right, then you are a success from day one, just for executing and sticking to the plan. You are not stressed or overwhelmed by your goal, but you are simply focused on getting it right on a day to day basis. You learn to enjoy the process, the journey. And as you get the hang of things and are consistent with your inputs, your results will catch up and get you where you need to be.
So, think about the big thing you are trying to achieve, and figure out what the leading indicators you should be focusing on. If you find inputs that are simple, within your control, trackable, with visible progression, and which are effectively aligned to your goals, then your success is only a matter of time.
by Oto | Nov 30, 2022 | Creativity, Inspiration, Mental Health, Musings, Personal Development, Productivity
If you have been a long time follower of my projects or content, you would know I’m prone to abruptly taking time off for up to months at a time. I used to think this was an issue, but lately, I have come to look at it as more of a feature than a bug.
Over the years, I’ve written a couple times about the need to cultivate empty space, or the need to lay fallow. I’ve found it important in my creative process, to allow for regular downtime.
I almost envy those who can keep producing almost indefinitely. Our present digital models of content creation and attention farming pressures us to constantly be at the wheel, spinning, creating and publishing. This is however a recipe for burnout, and can at its worst, turn this thing you like to do, this passion into an unfulfilling prison.
I am here to advocate that it is okay to approach creative work seasonally. Many entertainment producers operate in this way, think of your favourite musicians, authors, or even TV shows. Creatives like these release projects, with extended downtime in between them. Your favourite artist could release an album today, do a tour for a year or so, and then disappear for another 2 years before the next project.
I think that working in this way is more sustainable for numerous reasons.
- It allows things to end, to have a definite start date and an end date. Indefinite projects can be overwhelming. This way things are more manageable.
- You can use the downtime to rest, recover, live and gather inspiration and ideas for the next project. Goodbye burnout, hello relaxed productivity.
- It is in line with other things in our natural world that operate in seasons like daylight, weather conditions. Take a hint from Mother Nature.
- If you are the type to indulge in multiple projects, like me, you can cycle between your interests instead of being stuck doing the same thing over and over.
To pull this off, you would need a few things in place
- Be organised. I can’t tell you how much great it is to settle back into my work after some time away and slip right back into my notes and drafts and be able to pick up right where I left off, knowing that I’m clear on what I was doing before and where I was going. Be organised in your work space and work flow.
- Approach your projects as discrete pieces. Take a seasonal approach to your work. If you are doing a podcast, instead of committing to an indefinite schedule, decide to do a season of 10 episodes, and make them as good as you can. Then allow yourself to take some time off.
- Practice in the off season. Don’t completely shut down when you are not publishing projects. Use that time to improve, to hone your skills, develop new techniques and prepare to take your work to the next level on your next run.
- Focus on making Perennial Sellers, timeless content or classics. Instead of chasing fads or trends, create things that will last, that will be relevant even 10 years from now. Things that people would always need to come back to.
In this way, we can enjoy longer, deeper and more fulfilling creative careers.
